In Which The World Merely Reflects Marcella Backlund

Crawling Back to You

by ETHAN PETERSON

Marcella
creators Hans Rosenfeldt & Nicola Larder

Marcella Backland's husband Jason (Nicholas Pinnock) comes home from work to tell her that he doesn't want to live with her, or their two biracial children, ever again. Pinnock is probably one of the world's most underrated performers, imbuing each scene with a merciless foreboding it only sometimes deserves.

Marcella (Anna Friel) does not take it all that well; but she had to on some level know that this was coming. After twenty years of marriage, Jason goes back to work. Marcella calls him. She is so surprised that he simply returned to his job as the in-house counsel for a conglomerate that she drives over there and totals his SUV.

Otherwise Marcella is simply a housewife until a detective comes to her door. He isn't there about the car — police officers in Marcella Backland's world have total immunity from any crime, like unfaultable angels. Instead he wants her memories from her job as police detective of a serial killer who suffocated men and women by placing a plastic bag over their head and watching as they slowly became deprived of air. Marcella's temper has always been something of a problem for her so she sort of simultaneously empathizes and is revolted by this unspooling of violence.

Marcella has frequent blackouts. Early on in the show, which is available on Netflix in some regions and is the best noir to appear in quite some time, she meets with a psychotherapist about this problem. She talks to him in her distinctive way, a manner which is so completely unique that watching her becomes a distinct excitement.

She is not the type of person who is able to hide all of who she is, so she can only manage to conceal some of it. But this choice is still conscious, and so what emerges to friends, colleagues and lovers is a kind of abscess of a person.

Friel has openly talked about how exhausting it is to play Marcella. You can see why: unlike the quirky beauties she has portrayed in the past, this cop contains a real ugliness. Marcella is an attractive person for completely unlikely reasons. Her emotionality is never weaponized, only her logic, which is the only thing that makes her likable.

She eventually sleeps with Pinnock, in something of a goodbye fuck. Like most of her interactions, this also turns into an interrogation. She wants to know why he abandoned her and was unwilling to work through their problems. It emerges that the wealthy family whose company Jason works for also provided a mistress in the form of a leggy blonde named Grace (Maeve Dermody). She dies within the first few episodes, but Marcella's reaction to the affair and the revelation that her husband's sidepiece is pregnant is muted except for the fact that she blacks out and finds Grace's corpse, holding it in her arms.

Throughout the subsequent investigation, Marcella conceals her own possible guilt. We do not truly know how much violence she is capable of and, charmingly, neither does she. Marcella fortunately never carries a weapon on the show, although this backfires on more than one occasion, endangering her own life and the lives around her. I think the presence of a handgun would remind us too much that Marcella has abandoned her directive as a peacekeeper, and is more simply a psychotic angel of restorative justice.

Without over-the-top violence or sex, Marcella feels so much tauter and more open to possibilities. The top-notch cast that surrounds her exhibits a mirroring amount of peccadilloes. How difficult it is for most people to cover their evident weaknesses simply gives us another reason to admire the protagonist for muting her own. Too often an ensemble seems merely a representative cast of characters. On Marcella they are a psychic echo of their center, a woman only beginning to understand herself in middle-age.

Ethan Peterson is the senior contributor to This Recording. You can find an archive of his writing on This Recording here.

In Which Seth Rogen And Evan Goldberg Enter The American South

God Magic

by ETHAN PETERSON

Preacher
creators Seth Rogen & Evan Goldberg & Sam Caitlin
AMC

It sounds like the setup for a twisted joke. Two Jews make a television show about Jesus Christ. Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, when they are not driving the people in neighboring offices to insanity through the odiferous smell of their pot smoking, did not exactly pick up the Bible before making Preacher. If they did, it certainly was not the New Testament.

The graphic novel Preacher was about as knowledgeable about America as Seth Rogen is about the Gospel of Matthew. Preacher was one of many works by European writers attempting to depict what was happening in the country in the world producing most of the world's visual media. By caricaturing America in the same way America did to them, writers like Ennis, Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman levelled the playing field.

The graphic novel Preacher isn't really offensive in its rampant violence, which seems basically tame now, or its view of Christianity, which is more a silly appreciation than actual critique. Preacher's broader caricatures are harsh parodies of people in the American south, all easy targets.

Not being native to Texas, writer Garth Ennis ran out of jokes about the region and Preacher turned into a pretty serious story about what a man does when he loses faith and how he acts when he regains it, if he ever does. Of course it does not really matter if you pray to God if he does not really exist. In the world of Preacher, he does, but he is not the only one of his kind. Jesse Custer (Dominic Cooper) is the protagonist and titular character, whose interaction with an angel-demon hybrid gives him the power of command.

Cooper is a tiny man, but this only adds to his considerable charm, since he has to find a way to impress us as a person without using his physique or literal momentum. The first fight scene in Preacher occurs after Jesse encourages a local woman to file a complaint against her husband. It turns out the abuse of the wife is at her own request (!), and instead of apologizing, Jesse breaks the man's arm and beats up his friends. This outcome adds to the general sense that the main characters in Preacher may not exactly be the most God-fearing folks.

Take Jesse's ex-girlfriend Tulip (Ruth Negga). I remember her being so much more likable in the comic, where she wasn't explaining what a sterling examplar of womanhood she is all the time. In the pilot episode of Preacher, she builds a bazooka with a couple of children out of soup cans. It's completely unclear why this should make her sympathetic; in fact she would be the most monstrous character on this show if it were not for Jesse's vampire friend Cassidy.

The long Cassidy sections were the worst part of the comic, and yet their utter lack of narrative seriousness was a welcome relief from Garth Ennis' at times dreary tone. We learn Cassidy is undead very early on. This revelation would have been far better somewhere down the line — it means nothing when Preacher begins, and it has been approximated so many times in the last twenty years.

I figured Rogen and Goldberg would focus on what Preacher actually does do well, which is a stylized form of violence which at times and in certain lights resembles prayer. It takes real skill to make action so seamless it comes across in a delightful space between accuracy of purpose and choreography, and that is missing in AMC's Preacher. Rogen and Goldberg's take on Preacher remains entertaining because the subject matter and setting are still quite unique, but so far the killing takes a serious backseat to the large, slowish characterization. It is a welcome upending — more Sydney Pollack than Quentin Tarantino.

The most chaotic moments of Preacher have Rogen and Goldberg overmatched, since they do not know where to put the camera and it feels like they are recreating fights they've seen before. They have replaced that stylized violence with an actual understanding of these characters. Despite their inadequacies, you can really feel the world of Preacher is something they have thought about more deeply than Ennis ever did, and it is wonderful to see the world of the graphic novel find more stable roots in the drama of more realistic human lives.

Ethan Peterson is the senior contributor to This Recording. He last wrote in these pages about Julian Fellowes' Doctor Thorne.

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"One You Believe" - These United States (mp3)

In Which Julian Fellowes Destroys The Victorian Period For All Time

Completely Gilded and Insufferably Victorian

by ETHAN PETERSON

Doctor Thorne
creator Julian Fellowes

Martha Dunstable (Alison Brie) is an heiress in her early thirties. She is distinguished among her relatives and associates because she does not have an English accent. A suitor needing to replenish his family's fortunes, Frank (Richard McCabe) does not find her overly attractive or interesting, and he can't bring himself to hide his evident disgust. Julian Fellowes (Downton Abbey) is sick of all this shit now and he is moving to America. 

By the end, Downton Abbey became something else than what was intended. Anthony Trollope's novel Doctor Thorne becomes something quite different from the original novel. In the grand tradition of the Robocop remake, the all female Ghostbusters and any current James Bond, the people involved with these projects seem to loathe the original inspiration for their existence.

Largely the contempt comes out of a dated view of women and minorities present in the original material. The insistence of the British television industry on greenlighting Victorian adaptation after Victorian adaptation means the only way to subvert these attitudes is from the inside. British audiences similarly seemed to grow bored by Doctor Thorne.

Doctor Thorne is actually one of Trollope's better novels, but you would not know it and this is maybe not saying very much. Fellowes has every single character except the titular one incriminate their very existence. Thorne's niece Mary (Stefanie Martini) alternately looks gorgeous or horrendous depending on how Fellowes was feeling on a given day. She is given even less agency as a character than any Austen heroine, and the plot mostly consists of her wandering into a bunch of money she does not deserve. 

In order to make the events of Doctor Thorne a great deal more exciting than they actually are, Fellowes employs Ian McShane as a roguish baron who drinks himself to death. This occupys a great deal of time in the earlygoing, but soon Fellowes is forced to focus on Alison Brie, because nothing else going on attracts a great deal of interest. You would be completely forgiven for thinking this was a parody of Downton Abbey, if Fellowes did not have all his rich fops hurling insults at each other at every opportunity.

Casting Alison Brie in this morass is basically a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, her scenes are basically the only entertaining moments of Doctor Thorne despite Rebecca Front's efforts (in vain) to turn her economically devastated snob into a comedic centerpiece. Brie makes no effort to fit into this milieu whatsover, like if you cast Selena Gomez as a long lost Crawley sister. 

Fellowes' next project is another period piece, for NBC. "I’m immersed in 1880s New York. What a wonderful city it must have been," he told Deadline recently. It seems a shame despite the success of his last project that he has been reduced to going even further back in time, now to the end of the 19th century in America. He has floated the idea of using a young Countess Dowager in this series, which ensures we will be seeing a white, upper class mien.

To truly represent New York City in 1880, you would have to focus on people of every class. Detailing the habits and attitudes of servants who reflect the poise (or lack thereof) of their masters quickly grows tiresome. We want to see how regular people live and lived, not the ones in mansions and estates.

Ethan Peterson is the senior contributor to This Recording.

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"Future King" - Mason Jennings (mp3)